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Thursday, 13 August 2015

Medieval Sword Carries Mysterious Inscription

A medieval sword inscribed with a mysterious message is stumping researchers and causing a stir among armchair historians.

The 13th-century weapon was found in the River Witham in Lincolnshire,
in the United Kingdom, in 1825. It now belongs to the British Museum,
but is currently on loan to the British Library, where it's being
displayed as part of an exhibit on the 1215 Magna Carta.

The sword looks fairly ordinary at first glance. Weighing in at 2 lbs.,
10 ounces (1.2 kilograms) and measuring 38 inches (964 millimeters)
long, the weapon is steel, with a double edge and a hilt shaped like a
cross. But on one side of the sword is a mysterious inscription, made by
gold wire that has been inlaid into the steel, which reads,
"+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+."
What does this strange group of letters mean? No one knows for sure, according to the British Library,
which recently posted information about the weapon on its website,
along with a request for readers to help crack the seemingly
incomprehensible code.

Is the message some kind of magical incantation,
meant to empower the weapon's owner with mystical abilities during
battle? Perhaps the inscription is a religious blessing, or maybe it's
just the complicated signature of whoever forged the weapon. Those who
read the British Library's blog post put these and many other theories
forward regarding the sword's enigmatic message.

Dozens of commenters chimed in to help solve the mystery. And luckily,
one of those commenters had a lot of insight into the history of
inscribed swords in Europe. Marc van Hasselt, a graduate student of
medieval studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has studied
similarly inscribed swords and said that these weapons were "all the
rage" in 13th-century Europe. The British Library recently updated its
blog post with more information from van Hasselt.

Wordy weaponry
Many inscribed swords have been found in countries including Poland,
France, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, making the River
Witham sword "part of a large international family," according to van
Hasselt.

In 2006, researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden (as well as
several other institutions) started the Fyris Swords Project, a research
project dedicated to figuring out the historical context in which these
inscribed medieval swords were used.

The River Witham sword was forged in Germany, which was then the blade-making center of Europe, according to the British Museum.
And pre-Christian Germanic tribesman inscribed runes onto their swords,
axes and armor to "endow the items with magical powers," the Fyris
Swords Project researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Waffen- und Kostümkunde (Weaponry and Costumes) in 2009.

It's possible that this ancient tradition was carried over to Christian
times and that the inscriptions on the blades were therefore meant to
"invoke God’s holy name and his grace to gain support and protection in
battle," according to the researchers.

Such swords were likely owned by wealthy warriors, according to the
British Museum, which speculates that the River Witham sword belonged to
a knight or some other rich individual who rode into battle during the crusades
of the late medieval period. The British Museum also suggests that such
swords may have been a part of the ceremony in which a man became a knight and vowed to defend the church.

Cracking the code
Even though historians are fairly certain why inscribed swords were
popular in the medieval period and who owned them, they still aren't
sure just what these swords actually say. Interpreting the inscriptions
on the blades is like "trying to crack a mysterious code," according to
the Fyris Swords Project researchers.

While historians aren't entirely sure what language the letters on the
sword represent, they are fairly certain that the letters are a
short-form version of Latin, according to van Hasselt, who said that
Latin was the "international language of choice" in 13th-century Europe.
The first two letters on the River Witham sword are ND, which van
Hasselt said might be a kind of invocation that stands for "Nostrum
Dominus (our Lord) or Nomine Domini (name of the Lord)."

The XOXcombination that follows could refer to the Holy Trinity of the
Christian faith. And the two plus sign-shaped symbols before and after
the inscription are likely Christian crosses, according to the Fyris
Swords Project researchers.

This sort of speculation about what the sword's inscriptions might represent
has been going on for more than a century (researchers have been
publishing their interpretations of the inscriptions in the journal
Waffen- und Kostümkunde since 1904). The variety of the letter sequences
on the swords makes it clear that the inscriptions are not general
statements (i.e., a standard blessing written out in short form). Quite
the opposite is true, according to the researchers.

"[The] inscriptions (even though sometimes showing a constancy of
letters) are extremely variable and appear to be very personal. One
might say the individual secret of every sword bearer. It must have been
a special dictum [saying] so obvious and so self-evident to him that it
was not necessary to spell out its significant meaning," the
researchers said.

Commenters on the British Library website have suggested a number of
possible interpretations of the River Witham sword's inscription (which
you can read under the library's blog post). But just as with the other
inscribed swords found throughout Europe, it's unlikely that anyone will
be able to say with complete certainty just what message this medieval
sword conveys.